yea i did the stack o jam n it was a long time with zero communication, then months later we didn’t even receive scores based on the judging criteria, they just picked some winners with no reasoning
The Mega Stack “O” Jam concluded on August 21st at 11:59 PM Eastern. After checking eligibility for the following week, judging took place in September, and the finalists were announced on October 9th during Inside Unreal, earlier than the notification timeline listed in the official rules.
As for the judging, we have built a robust rubric that dives into the specifics of each criteria, and we have multiple judges within the industry, including those internal to Epic. Scores have historically not been released across challenges and jams hosted by Epic Games.
As it stands, the status of the Mega Stack “O” Jam is that it is in prize fulfilment.
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The facts that i’m so suprised that the top 15s most played entry, most popular entry didn’t get any award.
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most popular entry didn’t get any award
Did you see who won the visual elements? This game!
Yeah, the MegaJam evaluation team decided that the best representation of creative visual elements on the game engine used by NATO, NASA and many game studios is… this game.
I’m going to highlight a few games that were completely ignored undeservingly. There are dozens more like them! To be hosent I don’t know whats wrong with the MegaJam evaluation team
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I’m also confused with certain projects winning certain awards, since I remember playing games that to me looked, sounded and played better than the winners. I don’t mean to shame anyone. I think all the winners did amazing job and I’m sure the judges tried to score everything fairly, but here’s a bit of hopefully constructive feedback.
I’m aware the rules say that the judging scores for the criteria will not be reveled, but I hope this will be changed in future game jams. Not only would it bring more transparency into the judging process, but it would also help contestants see in which areas do they need to improve the most. If there’s a “public shaming“ concern, it could be an opt in checkbox in the submission form.
I would also welcome more detailed judging criteria for the modifier categories. For example the RTX on the description says “For the best game that harnesses NvRTX“ (while the itch.io page also specifies you have to include at least 1 RTX feature), it doesn’t specify if that’s the only thing that’s scored. The game that won the first place in this category had literally no audio. Does that mean the audio in this category wasn’t scored? If that’s the case it would be nice to know that ahead of time. If it was scored, is the game visually and gameplay-wise so much superior to the other ones that it deserved the win anyways? Here are the videos, and I recommend you playing the games as well, so you can decide for yourself.
RTX On - 1st place | Glitch In The Labyrinth by nocttokki
RTX On - 2nd place | BioLume by Bomborant
RTX On - 3rd place | LUNN Live Until Next Night by SourySK
For transparency, the 3rd place submission was my game. That’s why I’ve noticed this in this category, but It’s possible similar questions arise in others. And yes, I’m obviously biased towards my project, but I don’t mean to complain for complaining sake. I want to give a bit of constructive criticism, which I hope will make the future game jams better. Even if I knew the audio isn’t rated in this category, I would still spend hours making custom SFX and writing music, because I believe it makes the game experience better overall.
Huge congrats to all the winners, and thanks to Epic for hosting the game jam!
540 teams made a game. Waited for 5 months. And we have this 1 hour stream with really questionable decision and also a lot of categories were missed (houdini, soundtrack and so on). We understand that GameJams is not main scope of Epic. But this is a bit frustrating TBH.
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I agree with everyone above. The choices for winners were highly questionable. Almost like they didn’t play all of the games. One of the winners clearly used the default grid material which was explicitly disallowed.
The stream quality was absolutely awful. Some of the showcases were at ~20fps or lower. One of the mentioned games had gameplay on screen for less than one second. How can this be so unorganized when there was 5 months to get it right?
I also agree that the judging should have been transparent. The normal process for jams is community driven judging. I actually think the community would have picked much better than any of the judges did. Even when jams are judged by a specific panel, they show themselves playing the games, or give feedback to prove the submission was played. One judge did not play 500 games so the judging was unfair. It would appear to me that some judges would have no comparison for a good game vs a bad submission if they only played a handful of games to compare. If I only played bad submissions I would rate a decent game highly but the opposite can also be true. If my baseline is awful submissions then the games I end up sending up as good may not actually compete with some of the other submissions. Then another judge that has arguably played the best games in the jam but can only pick 25% of their lot forces them to leave out games that actually were better than the other judges 25%. I assume this is exactly what happened. There were many, many games submitted that were great lengths better than some of the winners but somehow missed being highlighted.
I anticipate there will be no changes beyond reducing it from 5 months turn around. And I also think our feedback here will never matter, even if some community manager says otherwise. It’s corporate cope. They did the same thing saying vbucks weren’t going to increase in price from the leak. And then turned around and did exactly what they said wasn’t true. As such, I will not participate in any further jams ran by Epic. I hope other creators will show our disdain for the indifference by also refusing to participate in the next jam. We deserve better.